Social Psychology (Psychology Subject) Flashcards
Social psychology
*the study of how people relate to and influence each other
- uses experimental method to study individuals
Norman Triplett
- conducted the first official social psychology type experiment in 1897 on social facilitation
— cyclists performed better paced by others than alone
Kurt Lewin
- founder of the field of social psychology
- Gestalt ideas to social behavior
- conceived field theory
— the total of influences upon individual behavior - a person’s life space
— the collection of forces upon the individual - valence, vector, and barrier are forces in the life space
Fritz Heider
- attribution theory
— the study of how people infer the causes of others’ behavior; people attribute intentions/emotions to anything - balance theory
— the study of how people make their feelings/actions consistent to preserve psychological homeostasis
Actor-observer attributional divergence
*the tendency for the person performing the behavior to have a different perspective on the situation than the person watching the behavior
Self-serving attributional bias
*interpreting one’s own actions and motives in a positive way
- blaming situations for failures and taking credit for successes
- “better than average” mentality
Illusory correlation
*assuming that two unrelated things have a relationship
Slippery slope
*logical fallacy that says a small, insignificant first step in one direction will lead to greater steps that will eventually have a significant impact
Hindsight bias
*believing after the fact that you knew all along
Halo effect
*thinking that if someone has one good quality then he has only good qualities
Self-fulfilling prophecy
*when one’s expectations somehow draw out, or cause, the very behavior that’s expected
False consensus bias
*assuming most other people think as you do
Lee Ross
- studied subjects who were first made to believe a statement and then later told it was false
- subjects continued to believe the statement if they had processed it and devised their own logical explanation
Richard Nisbett
- showed that we lack awareness for why we do what we do
Base-rate fallacy
*overestimating the general frequency of things we’re most familiar with
M. J. Lerner’s just world bias
*the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people
- uncomfortable for people to accept that bad things happen to good people, so they blame the victim
Ellen Langer
- studied the illusion of control
— belief that you can control things you actually have no influence on - the driving force behind manipulating the lottery, gambling, and superstition
Oversimplification
*the tendency to make simple explanations for complex events
- people hold onto original ideas about cause even when new factors emerge
Representativeness heuristic
*using shortcut about typical assumptions to guess at an answer rather than relying on logic
Availability heuristic
*people think there is a higher proportion of one thing in a group than there really is because examples of that one thing comes to mind more easily
Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory
- it’s uncomfortable for people to have beliefs that don’t match their actions
- after making difficult decision, people are motivated to back their actions up by touting corresponding beliefs
- the less the act is justified by circumstance, the more we feel the need to justify it by bringing our attitude in line with the behavior
Daryl Bem’s self-perception theory
- alternative explanation to cognitive dissonance
- when people are unsure of their beliefs, they take their cues from their own behavior
Overjustification effect
- tendency to assume that we must not want to do things that we’re paid/compensated to do
Gain-loss theory
- people act in order to obtain gain and avoid loss
- people favor situations that start out negatively but end positively
Social exchange theory
- humans interact in ways that maximize reward and minimize costs
Self-presentation
- we act in ways that are in line with our attitudes or will be accepted by others
- important influence on behavior
Self-monitoring
*the process by which people pay close attention to their actions
- as a result, people change their behaviors to be more favorable
Impression management
*behaving in ways that might make a good impression
Social facilitation
*tendency for the presence of others to enhance/hinder performance
- Robert Zajonc found presence of others helps with easy tasks but hinders complex tasks
Social comparison
*evaluating one’s own actions, abilities, opinions, ideas by comparing with others
- used as an argument against mainstreaming
- children with difficulties in class with regular children may result in lower self-esteem for problematic kid
Role
*set of behavior norms that seem suitable for a particular person
Morton Deutsch
- prisoner’s dilemma and trucking company game story to illustrate struggle between cooperation and competition
- lack of trust leads to more competition
Equity theory
*idea that people feel most comfortable in situations in which rewards and punishments are equal, fitting, or highly logical
- overbenefited people tend to feel guilty
- random or illogical punishments make people anxious
Stanley Milgram’s stimulus-overload theory
- explains why urbanites are less prosocial than country folk
- urbanites don’t need any more interaction
Reciprocal interaction
*the constant exchange of influences between people
- a constant factor in behavior
Conformity
*going with real or perceived group pressure
- compliance (publicly, not privately)
- acceptance (change actions + beliefs to conform)
- dissenter (individual who speaks out against the majority)
An individual is most likely to conform when:
- there’s a majority opinion
- the majority has a unanimous position
- majority has high status, or individual is concerned with own status
- situation is in public
- individual was not previously committed to another position
- individual has low self-esteem
- individual scores high on a measure of authoritarianism
Reactance
*refusal to conform that may occur as a result of a blatant attempt to control
- people will often not conform if they’re forewarned that others will attempt to change them
Stanley Milgram’s teacher and learner experiment
- “teacher” ordered to administer painful electric shocks to “learner”
- conditions facilitating conformity include remoteness of the victim, proximity of experimenter/commander, a legitimate-seeming commander, and conformity of other subjects
Philip Zimbardo
- people wearing hoods (and so deindividuated) more willing to administer higher levels of shock than people without hoods
- prison simulation experiments
— people willing to step into surprising roles
Solomon Asch
- subjects listened to the staged “opinion” of others
- subjects conformed to incorrect opinion of others
- unanimity seemed to be influential factor
Muzafer Sherif
- peoples’ descriptions of autokinetic effect were influenced by others’ descriptions
Individual speaker most likely to change a listener’s attitude if:
- the speaker is an expert and/or trustworthy
- similar to the listener
- acceptable to the listener
- overheard rather than obviously trying to influence
- the content is anecdotal, emotional, or shocking
- speaker is part of a two-person debate rather than a one-sided argument
R. E. Petty and J. T. Cacioppo’s elaboration likelihood model of persuasion
- people very involved in an issue listen to strengths of arguments in the issue rather than more superficial factors, like characteristics of the speaker
Sleeper effect
- explains why persuasive communication from a source of low credibility may become more acceptable after the fact
McGuire’s inoculation theory
- people’s beliefs are vulnerable if they’ve never faced a challenge
- once experiencing a challenge to their opinions, they’re less vulnerable
- challenge is like a vaccination
Deindividuation
- individual identity or accountability is de-emphasized
- may result from mingling in a crowd, wearing uniforms, or otherwise adopting a larger group identity
The Kitty Genovese case
*murder of a woman witnessed by scores of people
- led to investigation of the bystander effect
— why people are less likely to help when others are present
Diffusion of responsibility
*tendency that the larger the group, the less likely individuals in the group will act/take responsibility
- everyone waits for someone else to act, result of deindividuation
Social loafing
*tendency to work less hard in a group as the result of diffusion of responsibility
- it’s guarded against when each individual is closely monitored
Philip Zimbardo
- antisocial behavior positively correlates with population density
Group conflict
- competition for scarce resources causes conflict in a group
- Muzafer Sherif showed that win/lose game-type competition triggers conflict
Sherif’s Robbers’ cave experiment (a study about prejudice) showed group conflict is most effectively overcome by need for cooperative attention to a higher superordinate goal
Contact and conflict
Contact with opposing party decreases conflict; we fear what we do not know
Group polarization
- studied by James Stoner
- concept that group discussion serves to strengthen the already dominant point of view
- explains the risky shift, or why groups will take greater risks than individuals
Groupthink
- studied by Irving Janis
- likely to occur in a group that has unquestioned beliefs, pressure to conform, invulnerability, censors, cohesiveness within, isolation from without, and a strong leader
Pluralistic ignorance
*most people in a group privately disagree with something but incorrectly believe that most people in the group agree with it
Kenneth and Mamie Clark
- conducted doll preference studies
- demonstrated negative effects that group segregation had on African-American children’s self-esteem
- African-American children thought the white dolls were better
Ingroup/outgroup bias
*individuals in one group think their members have more positive qualities and fewer negative qualities than members of the other group even though the qualities are the same in each
- the basis for prejudice
We’re attracted to people who:
- are near us, because we got a chance to know them (propinquity)
- physically attractive
- attitudes similar to our own
- like us back (reciprocity)
Opposites do not attract
the old saying is just talk, according to research
Reciprocity of disclosure
*sharing secrets/feelings
- facilitates emotional closeness
Excitation-transfer theory
- sometimes we attribute our excitement/physiological arousal about one thing to something else
- I.e., thinking we like our date more than we do while bungee jumping
Mere-exposure effect
*how stimuli are rated
- the more we see/experience something, the more positively we rate it
Richard Lazarus
- studied stress and coping
- problem-focused coping (changing the stressor)
- emotion-focused coping (changing our response to a stressor)
Objective self-awareness
- achieved through self-perception, high self-monitoring, internality, and self-efficacy
- deindividuation would work against objective self-awareness
Door-in-the-face
*a sales tactic in which people ask for more than they would ever get and then “settle” for less (the realistic amount hoped for)
Foot-in-the-door phenomenon
*doing a small favor makes people more willing to do larger ones later
Social support network
- … effects on mental health have emerged an area of study that combines social and clinical ideas
J. Rodin and E. Langer
- nursing home residents who have plants to care for have better health and lower mortality rates
Bogus pipeline
*an instrument that measures physiological reactions in order to measure the truthfulness of attitude self-reporting
Peter principle
*the concept that people are promoted at work until they reach a position of incompetence, the position in which they remain
Stuart Valins
- studied environmental influences on behavior
- architecture matters
— students in long-corridor dorms feel more stressed and withdrawn than in suite-style dorms
Leonard Berkowitz’s frustration-aggression hypothesis
- posits a relationship between frustration in achieving a goal (no matter how small) and the show of aggression
M. Rokeach
- studied racial bias and the similarity of beliefs
- people prefer like-minded people > like-skinned people
- racial bias decreases as attitude similarity between people increases
M. Fischbein and I. Ajzen
- known for their theory of reasoned action
— people’s behavior in a given situation is determined by their attitude about the situation and social norms
Cross-cultural research
- revolves around determining whether Western ways of conceptualizing/behaving are the same as the ways of other cultures
- Hazel Markus found Eastern countries value interdependence over independence (Western)
— interdependence = Japan; individuals more likely to demonstrate conformity, modesty and pessimism
— independence = U.S.; individuals more likely to show optimism, self-enhancement, and individuality
Attitude
*a positive, negative, or neutral evaluation of a person, issue, or object
Elaine Hatfield
- passionate love (intense longing for the union with another and a state of profound physiological arousal)
— based on a biophysiological system shared with other primates
— a powerful emotion that can be both positive (reciprocal) and negative (unrequited) - companionate love (affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply entwined)
— achieved via mutual trust, respect, commitment
— often characterizes later stages of relationships
Paul Ekman
- 6 basic emotions: sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust
- Facial Action Coding System (FACS coding) used by researchers to code facial expressions for emotion
— helps with shit like determine whether a smile is genuine
Reciprocal socialization
*two parties (i.e., parents and children) adapt to/are socialized by each other
- I.e., parents learn new slang picked up from children; children learn to respect rules/traditions
Harold Kelley
- attributions we make about our actions/those of others are usually accurate
- based on the consistency, distinctiveness, and consensus of the action
Industrial/organizational psychology (I/O psychology)
*branch of psychology that deals with the workplace
- work to increase an organization’s efficiency and functionality by improving the performance and well-being of the people in the organization
Walter Dill Scott
- one of the first people to apply psychology principles to business; employed psychological principles in advertising
- helped the military implement psychological testing to aid with personnel selection
Henry Landsberger
- Hawthorne effect
- people’s performance changes when they’re being observed
Muzafer Sherif
- Robbers Cave Experiments
— how easily in-groups and out-groups can form
— revealed strategies for conflict resolution
Sociotechnical systems
*a method of work design that acknowledges the interaction between people and technology in the workplace
Sunk cost
*an expense that has been incurred and cannot be recovered
- best strategy is to ignore these when making decisions, because money that has already been spent is irrelevant to the future
